


kids were laughing in my classes while i was scheming for the masses

by isthisenoughorcanwegohigher



Series: they'll be okay without you [1]
Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28880808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher/pseuds/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher
Summary: Alby's dead, but that doesn't mean his story is over. He was the leader of the Glade, and that doesn't die easily. He still needs to make sure that his friends get out of the Maze safely. Keep them safe from WCKD. But how can he do anything when he's dead? The most he can do is watch, and hope. Trust that they'll manage without him.
Series: they'll be okay without you [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2118039
Kudos: 1





	kids were laughing in my classes while i was scheming for the masses

**Author's Note:**

> part 1 of 4 in the "they'll be okay without you" series

The last thing he remembered was the thatch roof scraping against his sides, his face, his hands. The terrified look on Thomas’s face, the desperation in Newt’s eyes, the resignation in Minho’s. He couldn’t bear to watch the Glade, so dark, plunged into despair and terror, burning in the still grey twilight, and so Alby had closed his eyes as the Griever carried him out of the only home he could remember.

When he opened his eyes again, long after the feeling of being let go, long past the point of being alarmed and confused and desperate and aching to know where he was, where he had been taken, longer than he had ever made himself stay in the dark and the fear and the bone-deep itch to know, he was overwhelmed by the desire to screw his eyes shut again. To close them so tightly that he could know he was closing them, know that he could open again, could feel it, could be sure that he was in control and this wasn’t all some sick dream, because when he opened his eyes…. When Alby opened his eyes again, he was looking at his own body, stripped naked and lying prone on a metal table, covered only in a thin cotton sheet, with his eyes already open, cold, frozen and staring at something he couldn’t see. There were people, adults that he knew he’d seen before, knew the names of even if he couldn’t place them, they were just on the tip of his tongue, in full biohazard suits with hands full of pens and charts and papers he was afraid to read, scalpels and scissors and a glint in their eyes that he recognized because he’d seen it in the eyes of every Greenie in the Glade.

Curiosity. The desperation to learn, the desire to seek knowledge.

Alby had wanted to know once, too, the answers that these adults seemed determined to find by cutting him open, and he felt that desire drain out of him so swiftly that it left him dizzy, though he did not feel the urge to sit down and let the moment pass, breathe. This wasn’t an out of body experience if he could no longer feel his body. But before he could comprehend what this meant, the primal fear of what he was experiencing enveloped him and Alby found himself impossibly hyperventilating.

“Poor kid.” One of the doctors was speaking. Alby heard it distantly, a buzzing in his ears, and it calmed him slightly to know that he could hear. “He was their leader after George, right?”

A pang of stunned anger pierced through the haze.

“Yeah,” the other doctor confirmed. “Shame, I really thought he would make it to the end of the Trials. Damn.”

The first doctor laughed. “Oh, don’t tell me you joined the pool, Jenna. You know we’re only supposed to let, like, seven or so of them out.”

“Like you can lecture me about betting on them, Matt.” The second doctor, Jenna, said, rolling her eyes at her companion. “I know you’re betting that the plan with Gally won’t be successful.”

“I’m telling you that trying to use the mutation of the Flare we use the Grievers to inject them with won’t be a good way of hijacking them at this stage!” It was an age old argument between the two, though they knew no one would listen fully to them. They were still new to the Maze program, which was why they were stuck with the dead bodies of kids just a few years younger than they were. “We should do it after the swipe, or shortly after placement in the Maze, not after years.”

“Thomas is the one they want Gally to kill, though, so they can’t use him.”

Alby had heard enough, and he tore his gaze from Matt and Jenna to look back at his body, hoping that he could use his anger and fear as a means of forcing himself back into it, back into life, but that was almost as bad a mistake as opening his eyes again had been. He’d been so focused, so distracted on watching Matt and Jenna to see what their body language was saying, that he’d completely missed that they’d started cutting him open.

He should have felt it. He wanted to feel it. He’d never wanted to feel pain so badly in his life, and he was beginning to understand why Newt had thrown himself from the Maze walls. Though Newt had wanted to feel the pain of death, in quite the same way Alby found himself yearning for the pain of life.

With no other plan besides a half-assed idea, Alby turned and, trying to open the door to the room, found that he could pass right through it, and so he ran through the cold stone halls, feet bare on the floor, wishing he could feel it and yet at the same time grateful that he was in the state he was in. Now it would just be helpful if he knew the layout of this place, wherever it was, because he had no idea how to find his way back to the Griever hole, back to the Maze, to his friends. He needed to warn them, to help them, to guide them, lead them. He was their leader, the one they looked up to for a plan. He couldn’t leave them, not now, not like this, not when these people that had put them here were toying with them. Always had been. He had to help his friends.

His family.

Alby needed to get back to them, but he couldn’t for the life of him-whatever life he had left in him, anyways, for he could think of no explanation for why he could still be here-figure out where he was going. And whichever way he turned, the hallway always ended with a door that seemed to hum with excitement whenever he got too close, and behind from which shone a bright and warm light. He was afraid of what was behind that door, though less so than he was of everything else right now, and in equal part he was drawn toward it. After another dead end that shouldn’t have resulted in the same door and yet did, Alby finally caved.

“Fine.” Deep down, he knew what opening this door meant, and he wasn’t ready, but something was telling him, deeper down, that he had to pass through this door. The best way he could help his friends was on the other side of it. So he sighed. “Fine,” he said again. “Fine, okay, I get it. Just show me how to help.”

He didn’t even have to reach down and turn the handle. Once he’d spoken, the door swung open on its own, and the warm light spilled out past the threshold, further than he’d seen light reach before, as if it had a life all its own. It inched across the floor, the walls, the ceiling, Closer and closer, and it started to feel as though the light was burning him, enveloping him. Alby closed his eyes again, but this time the fear had left him. He only felt a sense of calm, one that had evaded him ever since he and his friends had woken up in the Glade.

  
  


When Alby opened his eyes again, he was in a field. For a moment his stomach reeled with terror, but as his eyes adjusted to the light of the sun on his face, he recognized that there were no towering stone and ivy walls in the distance. No walls at all. Nothing was keeping him trapped here. He was free here. He blinked, feeling disoriented as both the terror of being back in the Maze and brief and intense longing to be back faded. He had no memory of being free. The people who had trapped him in the Maze had made sure of that. He wasn’t even sure if he’d been free before then, or if he’d been just as stuck. He wasn’t sure it mattered, especially now that he would never make it back there. Back to life.

After all, he wasn’t alive any more. And he knew that, and recognized it, but he still couldn’t say it. He still wasn’t ready for that. That word and all it meant, all he would have to change about the things he thought and believed. It might be easier if he had a hot drink, or, better yet, Gally’s special drink, which always made it easier to deal with hard things.

Alby jumped when a table appeared in his peripheral vision, on which rested a solitary glass containing what he could only guess and hope was Gally’s special drink. He approached the table cautiously, wondering if he would be able to sit on the ground and still get back up. Again, as he finished the thought, a chair showed up at the corner of the table.

“Interesting.” Alby sank gratefully into the chair regardless, grabbed the glass, and took a long sip of it. It burned in just the way he remembered, just the way he needed, and he focused his gaze on a spot a few feet away. Curiosity overtook him and he pictured a simple hut. There was a door, a few windows, a nice single room inside with a cot, a set of drawers, a chair. The bare necessities. Sure enough, the hut appeared. In spite of everything, Alby laughed. Then, curious if he could do the reverse, he stood up and took a few steps back, holding on to only the glass still half full. “I don’t need this anymore,” he said.

The table, chair, and hut all vanished. They left no imprint in the grass or the dirt around them.

“Neat.” But now there was a more pressing matter. Alby had gotten the feeling when he agreed with whatever had been drawing him here that he would be able to help his friends, but he couldn’t see a way in which to do so. He couldn’t see them here, let alone see a thing he actually recognized.

In answer, a shimmering light rose slowly out of the ground in front of him, a perfect circle. He watched it intently. It grew into the size of a small pond before settling back into the ground around itself. It even had the appearance of a pond, a gently moving body of water now in front of him. But there was a strange light emanating from it. Alby took a few steps forward and kneeled down in front of it. He gingerly laid his hands on the surface, and they broke it, coming to rest gently on the bottom of the pool. Disappointed, he pulled his hands back out and dried them on his pants, then gasped as the water shimmered again and became smooth as glass. He reached back down to try and touch it, but his hands no longer went through.

The light shining on the surface was moving, faster now, and it quickly resolved itself into a picture. Through the crystalline surface of the pool, Alby watched as Thomas and Teresa overpowered Gally’s friends and stationed themselves at the entrance to the Maze.

Thomas.

Alby understood in that moment, as his hands rested on the surface of the image, his gaze lingering longingly on Newt, and Minho, and little Chuck, who looked afraid but determined. He couldn’t get back to them. That was never a possibility. No, because he was…. He was dead. But they could get to him, in time, and if what he’d heard those people in that room say, Thomas was next. He could help Thomas and the rest of his friends adjust to this, just as he’d helped them adjust to the Glade.

Once a leader, always a leader. He would help his friends adjust to this, when it was their time.

Okay. He could do that. First, though, he needed to sleep. Very desperately needed to sleep. It was amazing how tired being dead could make you. He pictured the hut with the little cot again, and it was back, a few steps away from the other side of the pond. Alby pulled his hands away from the water, and the image faded. It was just water again. He would figure out the mechanics of that one after he slept, Alby decided. He rose and walked into the hut, sinking into the mattress.

Like everything else, sleep came quickly here. Almost the moment he put his head to the pillow, he was asleep.

  
  


Alby woke up before he was ready, and for the third time, he opened his eyes to something drastic changing.

“No!” He heard it outside, distantly, like the person was still not quite here yet. He wasn’t alone. “No. No, no, no.”


End file.
